This is the weekend before Shearing Day and we had a Farm Day for Farm Club members to help get the barn ready for shearing and to have a Fleece Preview and reserve their fleeces for their 2018 member years.

There was quite a crowd, many of whom are new members. There were some already in the barn working who aren’t in this photo. After introductions and safety tips (can you name the two most dangerous things on the farm?—maybe that will be another blog post) we gathered the sheep into the barn and looked at each sheep, checking ear tags against the clipboard list and drooling over fleeces.

I have about half a dozen sheep who have been wearing coats and Sumac, a yearling, is one of them.

We finished up with the rams about 12:30 and gathered to eat lunch and get in some knitting.

After lunch we went back to the barn and looked at the last of the Pope Valley sheep fleeces. (See these blog posts: Acquiring the sheep. Sheep at home . Shearing these sheep. More about shearing. ) FC members took home what they wanted.

Then we got to work. I am grateful to everyone for all the work they did. We cleaned buckets, cleaned the water trough, cleaned the ram pen, cleaned Peyton’s pen (the other ram pen), cleaned the main part of the barn and the alley, and moved and cleaned up bales of straw that the rats have made into rodent condos.

Rusty kept the rams away while we worked in the ram pen.

This probably deserves a blog post by itself. Dan has been working for the last couple of weeks to fix up the stall that has served as the barn office/junk room. No longer a junk room. It is going to be very organized—concrete floor, new window, pegboard. I haven’t brought everything back in here but when I do everything will have it’s place.

One of the things on the list was to somehow fish out all the stuff that has fallen into a gap between two parts of the barn. It turned out to be a three person job which is maybe why I hadn’t done it before. Deborah lit the gap with her phone flashlight. I was able to use a small shovel to drag out a feed scoop that had fallen in.

There were still things in the gap. I used the shovel and a pipe in a sort of chopstick method to pull the items far enough up that Terri could grab them.

Here are the items we rescued from the bottom of the gap in the walls. I think I tossed the mate to that glove a long time ago. Everything else is still serviceable. If you want to read about the chicken I rescued from this gap several years ago see this link in Rusty’s blog. I read about the plan to cover up the gap, but I never got around to it. Maybe that is on the list for this week.